Se­cure off­line stor­age

Last is­sue I talked my­self into us­ing a 22-year-old Power-Book 520 to do se­ri­ous writ­ing work. I was pleas­antly sur­prised by how us­able it still was, but I’ll be hon­est; the marvel was not how well it worked, but that it worked at all. Deal­ing with Sys­tem 7.5 was pretty trau­matic and I haven’t been tempted to start it up since. And so for this is­sue I was de­ter­mined to go for some­thing newer. Or at least less old.

The Power Mac G4 I found on eBay is the Mir­rored Drive Doors model re­leased in 2003, so at least I’m in the right mil­len­nium. It cost me just £42.50, and al­most all of that was postage. For that tri­fling sum, I have 300 times more me­mory than last month, 700 times as much disk space, and a 1.25GHz CPU. It starts up, it’s in good con­di­tion, and best of all it runs OS X Leop­ard. Surely this Mac would im­me­di­ately find use­ful em­ploy­ment in my house? Well yes, it did. But not in the way I had as­sumed…